The HTC Flyer’s Social Media Integration

Today I received a new toy, the HTC Flyer, which is a seven inch Android tablet that runs Android 2.3.3. While I have only had a few hours to play with this new tablet, I thought I would show you a couple of features that you might find of interest. The Flyer is not running the tablet version of Android, which is known as Honeycomb, and formally known as Android 3.x. Instead, it runs the version of Android known as Gingerbread, along with software called HTC Sense, which has been created by the hardware manufacturer. As I have stated in the past, I believe smartphones and tablets are the platform for social media, and HTC has reinforced this by the integration of social media into Sense.

When you first set up the Flyer you are asked to provide login credentials for Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. HTC Sense then pulls information from those services and presents them to you in number of different ways. One way is with the Friend Stream, which is an app that has a widget on one of the Flyer’s eight home screens.

As you can see in the screenshot, Friend Stream combines the newstreams for all three of the social media services on to one screen. The Friend Stream app provides greater control over what you see, providing the ability to filter out social media services, and the ability to toggle between a full news feed, status updates, pictures, links, lists, and notifications.

Finally, you might have noticed in the screenshot that there is an annotation. I wrote that on the screen using the active stylus, which HTC calls the Magic Pen. The Flyer has a capacitive touchscreen so that you can operate it with your fingers, but also has a active digitizer that supports digital ink. You can snap a screenshot at any time, annotate what is on the screen, and then send it to Dropbox or save it in Evernote.